The Manticore was published by Macmillan of Canada in 1972, winning the Governor General’s Award. The second volume of the Deptford Trilogy, it retells the events of Fifth Business from a different perspective — that of David Staunton, a successful Toronto lawyer whose father Boy Staunton (the Percy of the first novel) has died in mysterious circumstances (found drowned in the harbour with a stone in his mouth).
The novel is structured primarily as David’s Jungian analysis with Dr. Johanna von Haller in Zurich — a therapeutic transcript in which David recounts his life, gradually revealing the psychological damage inflicted by his father (narcissistic, domineering, incapable of genuine emotion) and the family secret (the snowball incident) that has shaped three generations without being acknowledged.
Davies uses Jungian psychology not as decoration but as structural principle: David’s analysis follows the stages Jung described (persona, shadow, anima) with genuine intellectual rigor, and the reader watches David’s understanding of himself deepen through the therapeutic process. The “manticore” of the title is a mythical creature David dreams about — a monster with a human face, which his analyst interprets as his image of his father (terrifying, powerful, wearing a mask of civilization over a predatory nature).
The novel’s achievement is to make psychoanalysis dramatically compelling: the therapeutic sessions build tension as surely as any thriller, because what David is approaching — the truth about his father, about himself, about the event that began everything — is genuinely dangerous to know.
Collecting The Manticore
First edition (Macmillan of Canada, Toronto, 1972): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First Canadian edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $60–$150
- US first (Viking, 1972): $15–$40